New England Town Name Generator

New England town names come from a handful of sources, and the region's fictional towns (Derry, Castle Rock, Stars Hollow, Arkham, Dunwich) work because they copy them. The oldest layer is transplanted English place names: Ipswich, Andover, Chelmsford, Braintree, Dedham and Falmouth were carried over by seventeenth-century settlers, and their suffixes (-bury, -ham, -field, -ford, -borough, -port) were then reused for new towns like Shrewsbury, Wrentham, Pittsfield and Newburyport. A second layer is Algonquian: Nantucket, Cohasset, Scituate, Narragansett, Winooski and Kennebunk are heard everywhere from Cape Cod to northern Maine.

Puritan settlers added biblical and virtue names such as Salem, Canaan, Goshen, Hebron, Harmony, Unity and Freedom, and the early republic added landowner surnames (Wolfeboro, Henniker, Lyndonville). Villages within a town take the parent name plus Center, Corners, Falls, Mills, Depot, Hollow, Neck, Harbor or a compass direction, which is why North, South, East and West versions of the same town sit a few miles apart.

The list below mixes real but lesser-known towns from all six states with invented names that follow the same rules. If you want a place that feels like it has a town meeting, a granite war memorial and a general store, start here, then decide whether it sits on the coast, on a river or in the hills.